I didn't notice the source page being ISO-8859-1 instead of ISO8859-1. If I enter the Linux command: export COZ_CLIENT_CODEPAGE=ISO8859-1 before doing the tofile, it works fine. I don't know where the ISO-8859-1 is coming from. The iconv on z/OS 1.12 (and 2.1) will accept ISO8859-1 but not ISO-8859-1.

Don't you just hate it when you find the "problem" a short time _after_ asking for help? Apparently this is a related to the locale on my Linux system. I have it set up as the "C" language, but looking at:

Well, I'm still running off at the keyboard (vice mouth). It turns out that ISO8859-1 is _NOT_ valid at all according to IANA (ref: https://www.iana.org/assignments/charac ... sets.xhtml) ISO-8859-1 has some aliases, but ISO8859-1 is not one of them. Too bad IBM (and Microsoft who apparently also uses ISO8859-1 at times) don't need to be bothered with standards. I'm going to use the COZ_CLIENT_CODEPAGE environment variable and mutter under my breath about IBM and MS.

What is happening is that the default client codepage is taken from the current locale. This can be overridden using the *client* environment variable: COZ_CLIENT_CODEPAGE).
The actual codepage conversion is done on z/OS.

You can also add name mappings by using the following z/OS environment variable:
export COZ_TRSUB_ISO-8859-1=ISO8859-1

Also, the iconv reason code (which we should really be printing in hex) is this:

zos$ bpxmtext C22C001C
JrEdcIcntEinval16: The from CCSID cannot be determined.
Action: The from converter name is invalid. Fix it and try again.

And we can confirm that z/OS iconv_open() doesn't know about ISO-8859-1 -

Thanks for the update. I'm using the COZ_CLIENT_CODEPAGE on my Linux system. I also reported this error on IBM's part on the MVS-OE forum, just so that others would know of it. I no longer put in problem reports to IBM because I no longer have access to IBMLink (false economy, IMO) and so cannot open an ETR or PMR on line. As to whether to put in a "fix" in your code to change ISO- to ISO if iconv() fails, I defer that decision to your greater knowledge. "It is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness" ... or something like that.